Businesses today are acting cooperatively to achieve compatible business goals. For example, companies are using just-in-time manufacturing techniques to reduce overhead. To make this work, companies rely heavily on the ability of their suppliers to provide materials when needed.
At the same time, in this digital age business executives have become accustomed to receiving information from a number of sources both inside and outside the company almost instantaneously. They rely on such information to drive their day-to-day management decisions.
In order to provide outside organizations with relevant information in a timely manner, many companies have expanded their order-processing departments to handle increased call volumes. In this environment, outside partners call into the company's order-processing department to request specific information. This requires an employee to be available to answer calls, pull up information and verbally convey information to the partner. This option is very expensive, slow, and offers a poor level of service. What is needed is a system and method of streamlining the flow of information between partner companies while limiting access to company proprietary information.
The Internet provides one possible solution to this problem. The nature of the Internet makes it an ideal vehicle for organizations to communicate and share information. The Internet offers low cost universal access to information. Because of this, Internet transactions are expected to more than quadruple over the next two years, and partner communications via the Internet will almost double. Companies have begun to look to the Internet as a medium allowing quick, easy and inexpensive to business partners. To date, however, their Internet options have been limited.
One solution is to give business partners access to the company internal network. Companies are hesitant to do this, however, since such access, if abused, can lead to the disclosure of company sensitive information.
Another solution is to replicate necessary information to a web server located outside the company's firewall. Such an approach does allow organizations direct access to the information while at the same time limiting their access to company sensitive information. For this environment to work, however, the MIS department must manually transfer information from the internal network to the external server. Therefore, while this option offers organizations direct access to necessary data, that information can be 24 to 48 hours old. When dealing with just-in-time inventory levels and large dollar amounts, 24 hours is too late. This option also creates a bottleneck in MIS, redundancy of data, and decreased data integrity.
What is needed is a system and method for giving controlled access to designated documents stored on the internal network while restricting access to company sensitive information.